The surprise new leader in the New York mayoral race is Bill de Blasio, a yuppie Brooklyn dad who’s running as a crusading liberal. The Democratic primary is on Tuesday, and suddenly de Blasio, who spent most of the race mired in third or fourth place in a crowded field of candidates, is way out in front. A Quinnipiac poll released this week put de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, at 43 percent, trailed by former Comptroller Bill Thompson (20 percent) and the long-presumed favorite, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (18 percent). Remember when Anthony Weiner rocketed into the contest, then flamed out spectacularly? He’s down to 7 percent.

If the poll is right and de Blasio gets more than 40 percent of the vote Tuesday, he will become the Democratic nominee, heavily favored to win the general election in a city where 68 percent of voters are registered Democrats, just 11 percent are Republicans, and New Yorkers, while generally satisfied with the city’s direction, are ready for a change after 12 years of Mayor Mike Bloomberg. But the primary electorate is difficult to poll with much precision, and even de Blasio’s campaign expects he will get less than 40 percent, putting him into an October 1 runoff with the second-place finisher.

At six feet five inches, de Blasio literally towers over the rest of the field. “The speed and extent to which he’s leapfrogged Thompson and Quinn and taken a commanding position in the race has surprised a lot of people,” says Doug Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College, who has known de Blasio since the two worked together on the 1989 mayoral campaign of David Dinkins, New York’s first and only black mayor. (De Blasio brought his mother’s eggplant parmesan and Italian bread to feed the campaign staff.) “His message of a city of inequalities began to resonate with a lot of people. But he also may owe his election, if he wins, to his son’s iconic Afro.”

Despite being a fixture of the New York’s tumultuous politics for more than two decades, de Blasio remains largely unknown. Here are eight things you might not know about the man who stands a good chance of becoming the next mayor of America’s largest city.

1. It’s pronounced “de BLAH-see-oh.” As in “aardvark,” not “anteater” or “A-rod.” (More on the Yankees in a minute.) And it’s not his birth name: Originally Warren Wilhelm, he was always called “Bill” by his family, and he took his mother’s maiden name after his father, whom he has described as an alcoholic haunted by his experience serving in World War II, left when he was young. “He had these demons that he couldn’t beat,” de Blasio recounted in a campaign video.

2. He has a diverse family. De Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, is black, and she and the couple’s biracial children -- Chiara, a college freshman, and Dante, a high-school junior -- have featured heavily in the campaign. The campaign’s first TV ad featured Dante -- who sports a majestic Afro -- praising his father’s policy proposals. The Afro became a sensation in the campaign, and the New York Daily Newseven accused de Blasio of “cashing in on [his] son’s hair.” According to the campaign’s research, de Blasio would be the first New York mayor in history with a child in the New York public schools. McCray, an activist, spoken-word poet and writer, was a lesbian who wrote about her sexuality in Essence magazine in a 1979 essay. But when she met de Blasio in 1991 -- he was an aide to then-Mayor Dinkins and she was working for the city’s human-rights commission -- she fell in love, she told Essenceearlier this year. “I thought, Whoa, what is this?,” McCray said. “But I also didn't think, Oh, now I'm attracted to men. I was attracted to Bill. He felt like the perfect person for me.” McCray and de Blasio say their families struggled to accept their relationship at first.

3. He’s the Brooklyn candidate. Lives in a Park Slope brownstone. Drives a hybrid. Put his kids in a childcare co-op. Drinks organic milk, grows vegetables in his yard, recycles. All the signifiers of socially conscious, bourgie Brooklynism are abundantly embodied in de Blasio, whose easygoing affect just adds to the Brooklyn-dad vibe. In his campaign, de Blasio has branded himself the candidate of the outer boroughs, channeling residents’ resentment of the Manhattan-centric prosperity of the Bloomberg years: “We’ve seen a pattern, under the Bloomberg administration, of favoring Manhattan over the outer boroughs,” he said at a recent campaign stop. It’s a line that cleverly positions de Blasio as the candidate of both the outer-borough working classes, including many white-ethnic and minority voters, and the educated white liberals who have increasingly taken over Brooklyn neighborhoods. On Saturday, de Blasio’s campaign released its official get-out-the-vote Spotify playlist, featuring such hipster-beloved bands as Vampire Weekend, Florence + the Machine, and LCD Soundsystem.

4. He’s an operative. De Blasio got his first taste of politics working on the Dinkins' 1989 campaign. After working in the Dinkins administration, de Blasio ran New York for Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign, then took a post in the federal Housing and Urban Development department under Andrew Cuomo, who's now the governor of New York. In 2000, de Blasio served as Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager when she ran for the U.S. Senate. With Clinton dogged by accusations of carpetbagging, de Blasio appears to have been picked as much for his New York bona fides as his political chops. While Clinton won by 12 points, de Blasio was quietly, unofficially pushed out of the campaign-manager role near the end amid concerns that his laid-back, consensus-driven management style was insufficiently decisive. Neither Cuomo nor Clinton has endorsed a mayoral candidate, but de Blasio is said to remain on friendly terms with both. He’s since switched from strategist to political actor, joining the City Council in 2001 and winning the public-advocate position against a better-known opponent in 2009. His political savvy is apparent in the way he’s come from behind to dominate the mayoral contest; even opponents say he's run a smart campaign.

5. He’s running to the left. De Blasio’s refrain is that New York under Bloomberg has become "a tale of two cities,” and his signature proposal is an ambitious plan to raise taxes on those making more than $500,000 and use the funds to create a universal pre-kindergarten program. He also proposes using zoning rules to force developers to build affordable housing, and ending Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk crime crackdown, which critics call discriminatory and a judge ruled unconstitutional last month.

Running to the left in a Democratic primary, particularly a Democratic primary in liberal New York City, might seem like a no-brainer, but the other candidates seem to have misjudged the extent to which New York Democrats -- shut out of the mayoralty since 1993, when Dinkins left office -- were itching to assert themselves and turn the page on Bloomberg. Comptroller John Liu was the only other candidate to propose raising taxes, and a fundraising scandal has kept him mired in single digits in the polls. Weiner enjoyed a brief rise in the polls based on his pugilistic liberal rhetoric, then fell again after further sex-scandal revelations. Most of all, Quinn’s closeness to Bloomberg, whose circumvention of the city’s term limits she helped engineer, has annoyed the Democratic base. “Bill and his team really grasped from the beginning that there was a significant shift in the political landscape in the last several years,” says Bob Master, a de Blasio supporter who serves as political director of the Communications Workers union and co-chair of the liberal Working Families Party. “He saw that there would be great openness to a message that said we need to fix what’s wrong with our economically divided society.”

6. He’s accused of hypocrisy. As de Blasio has risen in the polls, his rivals have portrayed him as insincere, seeking to undercut the sense of conviction that is his most appealing trait. Quinn is airing ads that accuse him of taking donations from the same developers he decried as slumlords, and of changing his tune on stop and frisk, which he once called a “valid policing tactic.” (The ad cuts off the quotation there, but de Blasio said in the next breath that he would “change the nature of it.”) Her campaign started a Tumblr called “A Tale of Two de Blasios,” while another opponent, former Comptroller Bill Thompson, has a website not-so-subtly titled BilldeBliar.com that accuses de Blasio of failing to disclose meetings with lobbyists. The hypocrisy charge is echoed by some former colleagues, such as state Senator Tony Avella, who served on the council for eight years with de Blasio and told City & State magazine: "I don't think he's always been this progressive, but it's interesting how candidates can remake themselves when they're running for office. It's revisionist history."

7. Celebrities love him. De Blasio has been endorsed by Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Sarah Jessica Parker, Steve Buscemi, and other stars. Other candidates also have celebrity backing -- Quinn got the coveted Lena Dunham endorsement -- but de Blasio is the only one to release a shameless highlight reel of all his famous friends.

8. He’s a Red Sox fan. De Blasio and his wife both grew up in Massachusetts, and he has remained an ardent fan of his onetime home team despite the hatred it inspires in the Five Boroughs. Bloomberg, who also grew up in Massachusetts, once harbored a soft Sox allegiance, but ditched it as mayor and isn’t particularly into baseball. De Blasio is different -- a member in good standing of Red Sox Nation. He raised his kids as Sox fans, has taken them to Sox spring training, and -- after a bet on the outcome of a Yankees-Sox playoff series -- once forced a City Council colleague to deliver a speech praising the Red Sox. De Blasio’s campaign gamely spins this as another instance of the candidate being true to his convictions, but to the Yankee fans that dominate the city, it’s hard to imagine being led by a Sox fan. “Last night, while my heart was breaking, he was probably overjoyed,” sulked Bill Cunningham, a longtime New York Democratic consultant who offered an otherwise upbeat assessment of de Blasio. (The Red Sox launched a four-game series with the Yankees with wins in Thursday and Friday’s games.) “Perhaps he’s not the right person to lead New York after all."

About the Author

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Jim Gilmore joins the race, and the Republican field jockeys for spots in the August 6 debate in Cleveland.

After decades as the butt of countless jokes, it’s Cleveland’s turn to laugh: Seldom have so many powerful people been so desperate to get to the Forest City. There’s one week until the Republican Party’s first primary debate of the cycle on August 6, and now there’s a mad dash to get into the top 10 and qualify for the main event.

With former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore filing papers to run for president on July 29, there are now 17 “major” candidates vying for the GOP nomination, though that’s an awfully imprecise descriptor. It takes in candidates with lengthy experience and a good chance at the White House, like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush; at least one person who is polling well but is manifestly unserious, namely Donald Trump; and people with long experience but no chance at the White House, like Gilmore. Yet it also excludes other people with long experience but no chance at the White House, such as former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.